Development Update — 29th June

Published in

Tangram

4 min readJun 29, 2019

For the last month, the team has been preparing for the release of test-net1. We have been focusing on extending the SWIM membership (Gossip) and consensus protocols, in order to ensure they work as expected before release. While this continues to progress steadily, we have identified several key areas we wish to optimise to ensure a smooth release for test-net1.

Notable updates:

Forward redemption key to message pool; [edda51a]
Check Tor running state; [2f83a1f]
Added primary key Attribute; [b90b1b6]
Simplified add or replace CRUD operation calls; [a0b05e0]
Adjustments when downloading messages; [44c5808]
Fix payment state; [4628f2b]
Hardening coin properties, wrapping BLAKE2b with Argon2id; [e605be8]
Adding mobile ready NoSQL database; [275b81a]
Clean-up and refactoring; [d932acf / 8f24617]
Implemented Bulletproofs (for smaller (size) Range Proofs)): [ff93532]

We have updated Tangram’s forked libsecp256k library to include Bulletproofs. Bulletproofs add optimisation to rangeproofs and further efficiencies. More can be read why Bulletproofs are important, but as a summary (*extracted from below article):

Bulletproofs are general zero-knowledge proofs;
They can be used to extend multiparty protocols such as multisignatures or Zero-Knowledge Contingent Payments;
Bulletproofs provide a much more efficient version of CT rangeproofs (when batch verifying, over 23x speed improvement);
These rangeproofs can be aggregated within transactions with only logarithmic size increase;
With sufficient aggregation, such as in Provisions, batch verification becomes over 120x as fast as the old proofs:

Bulletproofs: Faster Rangeproofs and Much More

In 2015 we announced Confidential Transactions (CT) as a headlining feature of Elements. This feature replaced…

blockstream.com

Node improvements

Fix SignMessage call to OnionService;
Fix Membership route;
Additional logging for new services;
Reconfigure Serilog;
Fix FailureDetectionTests;
Utilize HttpClientFactory to avoid socket exhaustion or expiration;
SocksPortHandler Singleton Experiment;
Adding Protobuf support;
Migration of consensus into Github:

Please feel free to ask and questions and discuss any of the above commits in any one of our channels (listed at the end of this article).

Identified bugs and status

A complete list of bugs can be found here.

Community engagement & review

asdfjkl; from the Tangram community came up with a proposal, check it out! We know and appreciate the insight community members can provide, given the vast variety of backgrounds we all have.

asdfjkl;’s proposal focuses on the funding and distribution models. These can be discussed in any of Tangram channels.

The below Google Docs are hosted by ‘experience’ (Tangram Community Manager).

(1) Doc: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1I9TaNavMZDFvCTd6Y9BTDFJxCGiODZ-XroNP3yuDLSE

(2) Excel: https://drive.google.com/open?id=17bPGoUu0FQ-VHROXwklCgKuLstxArT3PP-qbVZwiHDM

The community and team have been discussing the proposal over the course of the week, and will provide a recap in the coming weeks to ensure that there is no misalignment or misrepresentation regarding the proposal.

Thinking of contributing to the code?

Connect with any of the Core and/or Community managers OR simply create an issue/pull request!

I ran into a bug, how can I help?

We’re looking to improve on the first test-net for future ones. If you identify any bugs or security issues, you are more than welcome to report these by opening a ticket here: Github. You can also discuss this further in any one of our channels. We do appreciate if you’re able to share your .log file along with steps to recreate the issue. These can be emailed to dev@getsneak.org

Find your .log file in the following location:

Navigate to your root directory;
Open Cypher> bin > Release > netcoreapp2.2 > publish > cypher-2019<date>.log;
Email: dev@getsneak.org

Are you a new user?

A beginners guide (click here) was released (and proposed by the community) to provide new users a somewhat of a “friction-less” experience when downloading, installing and running Cypher. For more experienced new users, installation instructions can be found here.